Peter Frost's anthropology blog, with special reference to sexual selection and the evolution of skin, hair, and eye pigmentation

Friday, December 14, 2012

Year's end

Just horsing around? Or is there also a political
message?

It’s year’s end, and to date I’ve written nothing on
the three themes I promised to blog about back in January. One reason was the
need to comment on certain unforeseen events, like Phil Rushton’s death and the
confirmation that Europeans became white-skinned long after their ancestors had
arrived in Europe. Another reason was the difficulty in finding relevant data,
particularly with respect to the Burakumin of Japan.

So, before the clock runs out, I’ll post my thoughts
on all three themes:

Archaic
admixture

There is growing evidence that a Neanderthal-like
archaic population once inhabited parts of Africa. Lachance et al. (2012)
studied the genomes of three hunter-gatherer peoples from sub-Saharan Africa:
Pygmy, Hadza, and Sandawe. All three of them showed introgression from an
unknown archaic group whose ancestors had separated from ancestral modern
humans at about the same time as ancestral Neanderthals had.

Africa is probably the continent where modern humans
have the most archaic admixture, since it is where they were in contact with
archaic hominins for the longest time. In addition, it’s also where modern
humans were in contact with “almost-moderns” who offered weaker barriers to
intermixture because they were so similar behaviorally and physically.

But what does all this mean? If a human population
has a lot of archaic admixture, is it therefore more primitive anatomically and
mentally? Not really. The “modern” gene variants are still present in the gene
pool, and if they’re any better they will progressively displace their archaic
counterparts through natural selection. Over time, archaic admixture will thus
be confined to junk DNA of little or no selective value. Mallards, for
instance, have outbred so much that only a minority of them cluster together on
an mtDNA tree, the rest being scattered among black ducks (Avise et al., 1990).
Yet each and every one of them looks, quacks, and waddles like a mallard.

Indeed, if we follow Greg Cochran’s reasoning, an
admixed population provides natural selection with a wider range of interesting
variants, some of which might even be better than the ones in the original
genetic toolkit.

The Korean
tinderbox

In late capitalism, the elites are no longer
restrained by ties of national identity and are thus freer to enrich themselves
at the expense of their host society. This clash of interests lies at the heart
of the globalist project: on the one hand, jobs are outsourced to low-wage
countries; on the other, low-wage labor is insourced for jobs that cannot be
relocated, such as in the construction and service industries.

This two-way movement redistributes wealth from
owners of labor to owners of capital. Business people benefit from access to
lower-paid workers and weaker labor and environmental standards. Working people
are meanwhile thrown into competition with these other workers. As a result,
the top 10% of society is pulling farther and farther ahead of everyone else,
and this trend is taking place throughout the developed world. The rich are
getting richer … not by making a better product but by making the same product
with cheaper and less troublesome inputs of labor.

In the United States, globalism is being pushed by a
contrived bipartisan consensus. As Jeff Faux (2012) notes:

But the national discourse is
silent on the tacit agreement both parties have already made on the future that
lies ahead for the majority of working Americans: a dramatic drop in their
living standards. […] Even before the financial crash, real wages for the
typical American worker had been stagnant for 30 years as a result of: 1) trade
and investment deregulation that shoved American workers into a brutally
competitive global labor market for which they were unprepared; 2) the
relentless war on unions that began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980;
and 3) more recently, the erosion of the social safety net for low wage workers
and the unemployed.

In East Asia, South Korea has gone the furthest in
embracing the globalist project, as one observer recently summarized in
comparing that country with Ireland and the U.S.:

[…] lesser skilled jobs are
moving from advanced markets to developing nations. Companies recovering from
the financial shocks of 2008 have discovered more cost-effective processes than
older, more labor-intensive means through technology and outsourcing.
Consequently, the recent economic rebounds have not been matched with expected
re-employment.

Independent “knowledge professionals”
represent more and more of the labor force. Decreasing numbers of “permanent”
employees mean more reliance on multi-skilled, independent specialists on a
plug-in and plug-out basis for short- and medium-term projects. This major
development is becoming an increasingly common aspect of this new paradigm.

[…] I have seen an erosion of the
middle classes, and a strengthening of the upper-middle classes and upper
classes, while the lower classes are growing in size. At the same time, I have
seen the middle class getting by on less, and becoming much less aggressive
consumers. (Coyner, 2012)

South Korea has also gone global by opening its
borders to immigration. Officially, there are about 1.4 million foreigners
(2011), but this figure excludes illegal immigrants (estimated to be 30-50% of
the legal total) and foreigners who have acquired South Korean citizenship.
Also excluded are their Korean-born children (Anon, 2011).

This influx of foreign labor is framed as a positive
development that will make South Korea a more open society:

In order to sustain its
development, the country has increasingly turned to foreign labor and selective
immigration as countermeasures for its economic and demographic problems. The
state manages the influx of foreigners under a framework of “multiculturalism”
that professes openness towards becoming a “multicultural society” despite
resistance rooted in ethno-nationalism and a history of homogeneity. (Kim &
Kwon, 2012).

The veneer of official discourse conceals the
stresses and strains that are building among ordinary South Koreans. With
conditions of life deteriorating for the majority, animosity is growing toward
the top 10% whose lives are steadily improving. The latter are satirized in the
hit video “Gangnam style” by Korean rapper Psy:

Gangnam is a wealthy neighborhood
in the South Korean city of Seoul where young people go to party. In the song,
Psy describes the kind of guy he is and the kind of girl he wants, painting
caricatures of the ostentatious culture of people who hang out in Gangnam.

As The Atlantic pointed out in an in-depth article last month, behind
the flashy costumes and killer dance moves in Psy's video, there's a subtle
commentary on class in South Korea.

WHAT DOES THE CHORUS, 'OPPAN GANGNAM
STYLE,' MEAN?

It roughly means something like
'Your man has Gangnam Style.' 'Oppa,' which literally means 'older brother,' is
an affectionate term girls use to address older guy friends or a boyfriend. It
can also be used as a first-person pronoun, as PSY does here — in this case,
he's telling a woman that he has Gangnam style.

WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH HIS
SIGNATURE DANCE?

"It's a horse-riding
dance," PSY explained in an interview with NY1 anchor Michelle Park.
"So there is an invisible horse, and you're on it. (Goyette, 2012)

No, that’s not the whole story. The dance is also a
parody of an American cowboy. (Twirling a lasso is not a usual feature of
horseback riding). There is in fact a streak of anti-Americanism in all of
this, as recent revelations about Psy’s past have shown. Something is going on
beneath the apparent calm of South Korean society, and it won’t be pretty when
it finally comes to a head …

Places like South Korea and Greece, which lie on the
periphery of the current world-system, will be the first to push back against
globalism. In such countries, national identity is still strong and the elites
use little imagination in adapting their approach to local circumstances,
preferring to “copy and paste” from elsewhere. There too, the failure of
globalism will be the most obvious.

The Burakumin

In pre-modern Japanese society, the Burakumin
specialized in jobs that required contact with dead flesh, e.g., butchery,
leather making, and preparation of corpses for burial. They were and still are
socially stigmatized, and marriage with them was forbidden. Because of their
endogamy and their reserved occupations, they may have thus escaped the process
of demographic replacement that Gregory Clark (2007) described for English
society, i.e., they were not gradually replaced by downwardly moving members of
the middle class. As such, they might provide a glimpse into the genetic
predispositions that characterized the Japanese several centuries ago—at a time
when the State was largely absent and when social relations were quite
different.

In this earlier social environment, adult males were
expected to use force on a regular basis to defend themselves and their
families. Law courts did exist, but their rulings were enforced by the
aggrieved party, not by the State. Young men preferred to socialize with other
young men in small loosely hierarchical groups that sought to control local
territory while engaging in raids to plunder neighboring territories. Literacy
was rare, with less importance being given to creation, processing, and storage
of abstract information. Finally, time orientation was focused much more on the
present. This reflected the uncertainty over one’s own future, including life
expectancy, and also the difficulty in converting oral agreements into
long-term enforceable contracts.

These behavior patterns seem to describe the
Burakumin. Modern Japanese society is alienating to them, not because of
discrimination but because of its high level of domesticity, social discipline,
and nerdish devotion to intellectual pursuits. Male Burakumin, in particular,
prefer alternate forms of social affiliation and expression, such as the Yakuza
(Japanese mafia), the largest Yakuza syndicate being over 70% Burakumin.At school, their achievement scores have
remained nearly one standard deviation below those of other Japanese regardless
of the time and place of the research (BLHRRI, 1997). The persistent gap may
reflect a lack of either ability or interest, or a lack of both.

This topic unfortunately suffers from insufficient
good data. The American literature often asserts that IQ scores have risen
dramatically among Burakumin immigrants to the U.S., but Jason Malloy has shown
that this claim is an academic legend:

I often see media assertions like
Steve Olson in The Atlantic: “Yet
when the Buraku emigrate to the United States, the IQ gap between them and
other Japanese vanishes.” This claim is somewhat apocryphal. There is no data
for Burakumin in the US. False claims about US IQ data have mutated second-hand
from John Ogbu who claimed a study showed that the Buraku immigrants here “do
slightly better in school than the other Japanese immigrants”. The book chapter
Ogbu references for this claim (Ito 1966) however, is by a pseudonymous author
who relied strictly on gossip from non-outcast Japanese communities in
California to surmise how the outcasts here might be performing. The author’s
informants believed the US outcasts were more attractive, more fair-skinned,
and made more money. Though– as a testament to Ogbu’s immaculate scholarship–
the author reported no gossip about how these Burakumin performed in school.
(Cochran, 2011)

The Japanese literature doesn’t seem much better. It
generally admits the existence of negative stereotypes about the Burakumin but
provides little information on the content of these stereotypes.

References

Anon. (2011). Foreigners make up 3% of Korea’s
population, December 19, Gusts of Popular
Feeling

30 comments:

Difference Maker
said...

Archaic admixture"Might be"... "progressively"

These are not the words I want to hear purporting the benefits of admixture.

We may (or may not) pat ourselves on the back as being largely immune against the hybridization. But I look with no optimism on a future mixed world, not least because the introgressed variants will inevitably begin to infiltrate up the classes. Even accounting for assortative mating, these new hybrids have no reason to be as great as such children might have been.

After all, evolution, as we should know, does not have to select for the smartest, the bravest, the fastest, the handsomest, the noblest.

Evil indeed must the one in favor of admixture think this world, and "his" people

"Marxist materialism" has a specific meaning. It doesn't mean what you think it means.

I think I know what you meant, Anon. If you meant the notion that history operates according to iron laws, and capitalism will destroy itself and be replaced by a socialist utopia, then I don't think Peter thinks that. Do you? Peter was just saying something that happens to coincide with some notions voiced by Marx. Capitalism probably won't produce equilibrium. I just don't understand the problem you have with Peter's suggesting that have a market economy affects people's behavior in certain ways. That's all Anon.

And my comment was more about economics and biology in general. Even if we acknowledge that Marx said some things that sometimes coincide with actual trends, we can still understand that biology and genes play a role.

I think I know what you meant, Anon. If you meant the notion that history operates according to iron laws, and capitalism will destroy itself and be replaced by a socialist utopia, then I don't think Peter thinks that. Do you?

Like I said, I don't think you understand what was meant by "Marxist materialism". It doesn't mean that Peter actually subscribes to Marxism and its specific predictions.

It's off topic. I would appreciate if you could tell me where to find wide information and literature on variations of mating system of Millennials compared to the Boomers and Generation X, differences on dating and courtship patterns, the influence by the time period, social conditions and constructs, genetic factors, cultural norms, and institutional structures that surround mating market,etc. I need bibliography on this theme. Thanks.

North Koreans regard South Koreans as irredeemably corrupt and are appalled at non-Korean immigrants, whom they regard as subhuman.

Reunification might prove to be problematic for modern South Korean culture. More so because China has made it clear that reunification under South Korean leadership will not be permitted. China will annex North Korea first. So, any reunification will have to be under North Korean leadership, hopefully some what moderated.

Now that North Korea has an ICBM that can reach literally any target on the earth, Northern conquest of the South is at least conceivable. The US will not give up LA or Chicago or NYC for Seoul.

The stakes are so high now that Superpower America will not, could not, permit any state to roll back globalisation. Not even a marginal one. The instant a country starts to show signs of wanting to defect from the global system, the West will 'go nuclear' in a rhetorical sense, and identify the state as 'radical nationalist' and then fascist (ie mark it for destruction).

The US led global project is to remove substantive issues from political manifestos (or even discussion). Local allegiance, even the family, will be dismantled through 'rights'. Liberal legalism refuses to accept that any legitimate rights of native workers in democratic countries can conflict with the rights of 'migrants' to those countries.

Native workers in advanced countries can't affect the political system because business, media and academic types with their hands on the levers of power won't listen to people who are clannish, prone to violence, lack intellectuality and are not particularly bright.

Lets face it, working people are 'Burakumin' in the eyes of those who run the show.

North Koreans regard South Koreans as irredeemably corrupt and are appalled at non-Korean immigrants, whom they regard as subhuman.

I don't think it's really accurate to say that the North Koreans regard non-Koreans as "subhuman". The North Koreans seem to have a "nationalities" view that was common in the Communist bloc. This sort of view was also common in the pre-WW2 West. If anything, the Communist "nationalities" view is less "racist" and relatively more egalitarian than the kinds of more rigid views that prevailed in the pre-WW2 West since while different nationalities are affirmed, the differences among them are attributed to being on different stages of "socialist development" or some such.

But today, any nationalism is regarded by the dominant worldview in the West as being automatically hostile, "racist", etc.

Native workers in advanced countries can't affect the political system because business, media and academic types with their hands on the levers of power won't listen to people who are clannish, prone to violence, lack intellectuality and are not particularly bright.

Judging by their behavior and track record, it would seem that the "business, media and academic types with their hands on the levers of power" are the ones that are "clannish, prone to violence, lack intellectuality and are not particularly bright."

The stakes are so high now that Superpower America will not, could not, permit any state to roll back globalisation. Not even a marginal one. The instant a country starts to show signs of wanting to defect from the global system, the West will 'go nuclear' in a rhetorical sense, and identify the state as 'radical nationalist' and then fascist (ie mark it for destruction).

The US led global project is to remove substantive issues from political manifestos (or even discussion). Local allegiance, even the family, will be dismantled through 'rights'. Liberal legalism refuses to accept that any legitimate rights of native workers in democratic countries can conflict with the rights of 'migrants' to those countries.

Yes this is what is so dangerous. Civilization has controlled men in order to maintain its monopoly on violence (Peter has written about "genetic pacification"). This has generally been counter-balanced (up until recently in the West) with institutionalized patriarchy and "sexism" against women. The only way to not counter-balance this with sexism against women is to take control of reproduction ala Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. This appears to mean that it's a race against time for the West to go totally eusocial, with total, amoral, warfare against the developing world and against defectors in the developed world before their sexism conquers by sheer force of demography.

Mr Frost -- thank you v. much for some v. interesting posts. Yr series on Greece was excellent and I'll be re-reading this post too. Merry Xmas and, if Mayan prophecies don't intervene, I hope you carry on the good stuff, and gene-stuff (and g-stuff), in 2013.

Soon after taking power in 1961 Park Chung-hee initiated a nationwide program to reduce the birthrate. There was still a little bit of a youth bulge to be got over. In 1979 repression sparked an uprising in the city of Kwangju. The US re-enforced its forces in S.Korea and held the ring while Park Chung-hee sent in his army 'special forces' to restore order by shooting, bayoneting, clubbing and beating protesters to death. here. Park Chung-hee is remembered fondly by many older South Koreans (who increasingly outnumber the young ones of course). Park Chung-hee's daughter ascends to presidency. There won't be meaningful unrest (beyond grumbling) there aren't enough young people in South Korea for anything else. It's already game over there, and in the West too.

n 1979 repression sparked an uprising in the city of Kwangju. The US re-enforced its forces in S.Korea and held the ring while Park Chung-hee sent in his army 'special forces' to restore order by shooting, bayoneting, clubbing and beating protesters to death.

That uprising was in 1980. Park Chung-hee was assassinated in 1979 by the head of the Korean CIA. Some say that he was assassinated with the tacit approval of the US because they feared he would "go rogue" and seek nukes and greater independence.

"In late capitalism, the elites are no longer restrained by ties of national identity and are thus freer to enrich themselves at the expense of their host society. This clash of interests lies at the heart of the globalist project:"

WASPs have an obsessive desire to be "moral." This was a highly adaptive setup when morality was defined by tradition. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case. When circumstances change, an adaptive trait can become maladaptive.

Anon (and others),

I don't believe genes are everything. Human behavior is multidimensional, with inputs not only from genetic predispositions but also from present and past cultural environments and from the economic system.

I've never been a full-fledged Marxist. I used to consider myself a "Marxisant", i.e., someone who drew inspiration from Marxism while recognizing its deficiencies. I then became increasingly disillusioned. When the Cold War ended, I felt that Marxism deserved to be tossed onto the trash heap of history.

Today, I feel differently. Marxism helped to keep capitalism honest, and the Cold War deterred both superpowers from engaging in military adventurism. The current unipolar world is bringing out the worst features of capitalsm -- and of those political regimes that fall under its influence.

Jimmy,

Try:

L. Cohen (2012). The 20th Century Decline in the Private Cost to Women of Non-Marital Sex: Causes and Consequences

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2170522

Anon,

They probably looked like Khoisans (Bushmen, Hottentots), but a lot bigger.

Sykes,

The current world-system is decomposing at its periphery. China and Russia (which were never fully integrated into it) are increasingly able to go their own way. The situation is different for places like South Korea and Greece, which cannot easily leave this system and yet are finding the status quo more and more intolerable. It looks like we are moving toward a new bipolar world, with a Eurasian power bloc coalescing around Russia and China.

That in itself will be manageable. The problem lies in the willingness of the Western power bloc to abandon its global aims. It also lies in desperate 2nd-tier countries (like North Korea) that will try to instrumentalize this unstable situation.

Sean,

You're ruining my Christmas holidays with all of these interesting leads!

Caribou Casell,

Thanks! There'll be more to come in 2013. As for the Mayan calendar, the Mayans never did predict the end of the world on this date. It's simply the end of an era.

"You seem to hold a Marxist materialist view of historical and economic development. This is kind of odd in light of your general focus on genes and biology."

Race starts at extended family and works outwards. That may be less obvious to the average white person than it is to the disproportionately sociopathic elites.

."Um-am I reading the communist manifesto here?"

When capital was tied to land it was less portable. When capital was tied to minimum levels of training, education and infrastructure it was less portable. The greater the portability of wealth the greater the temptation to steal it.

Similar to why historically pastoralist peoples are likely to be more violent.

."The stakes are so high now that Superpower America will not, could not, permit any state to roll back globalisation. Not even a marginal one. The instant a country starts to show signs of wanting to defect from the global system, the West will 'go nuclear' in a rhetorical sense, and identify the state as 'radical nationalist' and then fascist (ie mark it for destruction)."

Except it's not really the west. Its America with Britain tagging along and ultimately it's not America and Britain it's the bankers of New York and London who own the politicians and ironically it's the globalized banking system which is destroying America's superpower status which in turn is allowing countries to break away from the globalized system enforced by that superpower status.

Anon, "Race starts at extended family and works outwards." But I know young women who are very close to their families and yet are with men of a different race.

In countries like S.Korea, the US bases are indirectly preventing the independent self defence, and the type of nationalist politics that goes with it. If the US was to begin losing ground they'd just change the rules like Nixon did when he deregulated capital in 1970.

Britain had the first workers movements it's the most advanced (decrepit) state in the world, the native society is dissolving away. If there is some kind of meaningful backlash it will be in France, which is where all kinds of political tendencies and movements have appeared first. (It doesn't have any US bases.)

Welcome to my blog! For the most part, this page will be an extension of my website, with comments relating to my research. But it will also branch out into more general discussions of human evolution.